At first glance Spells & Secrets looks like a cheap Harry Potter knockoff. And to be honest, it's exactly that but it also is a very fun and creative magic sandbox.
You play as a new studet at a spell caster academy which totally isn't Hogwarts. The school however gets attacked by evil spellcasters on your very first night. You manage to get to the safe zone on the school yard but other students and even some of the teachers are still missing. So you decide to go look for them because that's obviously the smart thing to do as a newbie spellcaster.

The game is in essence a roguelite, each run is randomized (because the school constantly changes it's layout) and you have to navigate through the different sections of the school to find the students and teachers with the endgoal being to find the headmaster of the school. On your way you will have to fight through monsters and make best use of your limited selection of beginner spells. These include some mundane abilities like telekinesis to move objects and enemies around, a basic spell projectile to do damage and the ability to push enemies and objects in front of you away among others. What is interesting here is how flexible the spell casting is. You can use them on a lot of different things and the game applies to your creativity to find efficient ways to deal with enemies. Each enemy type has a different kind of weakness that, if exploited, stuns them for a short duration and also let's them take double damage. An armadillo for example tries to roll over you but if it hits something else it will be stunned. You can either simply move to the side and avoid it. Or you can put an object in the way. Or, if you feel very michievous, you can even put another enemy in harms way, dealing with both enemies at the same time.
There are many ways to utilize spells this way, push allows you to knock objects into other enemies or let's you knock enemies into walls for damage. You can also combine spells for better results. Use levitate to immobilize an enemy by putting him into air, then freeze him for extended duration and then push him into another enemy as fast moving ice projectile.
Once you rescue some of your teachers, you can unlock new spells between runs. Unlike other roguelikes you won't have to find those spells during your runs, unlocked spells stay with you forever. You can also level unlocked spells to give them more power.
During your runs you can find different artifacts. These are the actual game changers. Each artifact relates to one of your spells, changing how it works. One artifact can change push that it now turns pushed objects and enemies into temporary bombs that explode after a short delay or they can change levitate to pull in other enemies close to the target, making it easier to line up an aoe spell.
The interaction between your spells, artifacts and the environment is what makes this game so much fun. You can just win by just chain casting spell orbs and do normal damage but that's boring, you want to turn enemies into bombs, lift them up and pull everyone to them before they explode.
But there's even another nice usage for your spells. Since this is a clone of Hogwarts, you can expect lots of hidden rooms and secrets. In almost every room in the game is some sort of hidden puzzle that you can solve. Doing so gives you a reward, gold, experience or even artifacts. But the game does rarely tell you if a puzzle is present. Which means the player has to explore and experiment around to find them. Some are more obvious then others and sometimes the game actually does give you a hint. And these puzzles are actually very good and very varied. Of course, once you know all of them, they become trivial but it's fun to figure out how they work for the first time.

Interesting to mention are the bosses. Bosses are always spellcasters which means they follow similiar rules like you do. They can cast the same types of spells as you, often focusing on a few that matches their personality. Since they mirror your gameplay, it feels very different to play against a spellcaster than the usual monster enemies. But I have to say, they are a little bit too easy since you can just pick them up with levitate like anything else (unless they cast the blocking spell, which they rarely do) and just put them in every harms way, often in their own spells. It's funny, sure, but not very challenging.

Besides that, my biggest criticsim would be the lack of creativity, which is ironic in a game all about creativity. Te gameplay itself is very creative but the story and worldbuilding not. The influence from harry Potter is a little bit too much on the nose. It's a magic school with four different houses, a bird animal as companion for the headmaster, the school is full of secrets and the main enemy faction in the game wears cloaks and masks. The shop is even mantained by a pair of twin brothers. Inspiration is good, straight up copying the source material isn't. While this does not ruin the game completely for me, it's something that does bother me a lot and probably other people too.